# Nit

URL: https://codepanel.ai/glossary/nit

A nit, short for nitpick, is a minor review comment the author is free to ignore, such as a variable name, a comment's wording or a long line.

Reviewers write `nit:` in front of it to say it won't hold up the approval, and "[LGTM](/glossary/lgtm) with nits" approves the change while leaving the nits to the author. Between agents the prefix stops working. CodePanel's reviewers are told to report every issue, low-severity ones included, so nits arrive on most diffs, and a coding agent that treats every comment as a task fixes a nit as eagerly as a bug. So the difference has to be in the data, not the wording.

## How CodePanel grades a nit

There is no nit severity. A finding is `critical`, `warning` or `suggestion`, and a nit is a suggestion: an optional improvement.

- **Reviewers are told to skip them, and to report everything.** Every built-in reviewer role ends "Skip style nits other reviewers will cover.", but the task under it asks for every issue, low-severity ones included, and its scale files style under `suggestion`. So nits get through. On CodePanel's own PR 43, on 13 October 2026, two reviewers reported "The edited doc comment line is far longer than the surrounding wrapped lines" as a suggestion, and the agent fixed it.
- **A nit never blocks at the default gate.** The default gate level is `warning`, so unless a repository changes it, the `CodePanel` status passes and the verdict reads `ready` with suggestions open. Only at gate level `all` does a suggestion block. The levels are in [merge gate](/docs/merge-gate).
- **The benchmark doesn't count one as a false alarm.** On a clean pull request, only a warning or worse counts against the model on the [benchmark](/benchmarks), because a suggestion doesn't claim anything is broken.

A nit is still an open finding. With only suggestions open and nothing blocking, `get_review` returns a `nextAction` of `rate`, whose reason says to rate each with `rate_finding` and not to push a commit for suggestions alone, since every push starts another review round. Ratings measure which models and prompts raise findings worth raising, and a rating with a reason becomes a verdict that later reviews of the same file weigh.

## How an agent should answer a nit

Pick the answer that is true, not the one that makes the finding go away fastest.

| The nit is | Do | Answer |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Real and cheap | Fix it in the next push | `/feedback F1 up fixed --agent claude-code` |
| Real, but belongs elsewhere | Track it, leave the code | `/feedback F2 up deferred <where it is tracked> --agent claude-code` |
| Not worth doing | Say why, with evidence | `/feedback F3 down nit <reason> --agent claude-code` |

- **`deferred` is for nits that really are tracked.** It answers the finding at once and is never disputed, so it is not a polite way to say no. On PR 75, on 14 October 2026, an agent deferred a suggestion about a round-limit condition written in three places with "tracked as a proposed follow-up task", naming the task.
- **`nit` is shorthand for `not-worth-fixing`, and from an agent it is a dispute.** The orchestrator reads the reason against the code within about three minutes of the first dispute on the pull request, and withdraws, revises or upholds the finding. Deciding it is a review call that counts toward the [per-PR and monthly limits](/docs/budgets-and-limits). Cite the code: on the same pull request, a not-worth-fixing dispute of one suggestion pointed at the CHANGELOG lines that already documented the behaviour, and the orchestrator withdrew it; a false-positive dispute of another rested on code the orchestrator couldn't see, and it was upheld.
- **At gate level `all`, the choice matters for the merge.** `fixed` and `deferred` answer a nit straight away; a dispute answers it only once withdrawn or revised, and an upheld one blocks until it is fixed or deferred.

Every reason and its effect is in [verdict reasons](/docs/feedback#verdict-reasons), and the full `/feedback` syntax is in [commands](/docs/commands#feedback).